Mars Wrigley is making an investment $175 million in its Topeka, Kansas, chocolate sweet plant, with plans to increase manufacturing of Snickers and start production Milky Method and three Musketeers bars there, the corporate introduced this week.
The funding can even pay for brand new apparatus to spice up packaging efficiencies for Mars Wrigley sweet made on the facility, which additionally contains Twix and M&M’s Peanut, in line with a press liberate shared with Meals Dive. The growth paintings is slated to be completed subsequent 12 months, and can upload 100 jobs to the plant.
The Topeka plant opened in 2014, and Mars Wrigley has invested a complete of $750 million within the facility through the years.
Information of the Kansas plant growth comes not up to 3 months after Mars Wrigley introduced it was once remaining its authentic Mars manufacturing unit in Chicago. The privately-owned corporate didn’t provide an explanation for the verdict, rather than to notice that manufacturing from that facility, which manufactures M&M’s, Twix, Snickers, Milky Method and Skittles, will shift to different Mars Wrigley crops over the following two years. It is unclear if the Topeka plant is assuming a few of that manufacturing capability; Meals Dive has requested the corporate for remark.
The Topeka funding displays Mars Wrigley’s optimism within the outlook for sweet, which hit a document $36.9 billion in U.S. retail gross sales closing 12 months, in line with the Nationwide Confectioners Affiliation. This adopted a slight gross sales dip in 2020. NCA reported a 9.2% building up in gross sales for chocolate sweet.
In the meantime, father or mother corporate Mars Inc., which additionally makes Ben’s Unique Rice and Pedigree dog food, filed bureaucracy closing week with Fairfax County in Virginia to increase its McLean headquarters, the place it’s been positioned since 1984. The corporate plans to demolish one development at the web site so it may increase some other, and upload about 31,000 sq. ft to the positioning, Washington Industry Magazine reported.
“Given our expansion, we’re exploring how we will evolve our place of job to fulfill the converting wishes of our trade and our Friends,” the corporate mentioned in a observation shared with Meals Dive. The appliance submitting famous that the development would function “world-class structure” and “a couple of inexperienced development options.”
